Williamson's concept puts him in bub club

29 May 2003 — 10:00am

The best time to have children, conception difficulties and the politics of IVF are not obvious topics for a 61-year-old male playwright best known for works about football and the sexual politics of the swinging '60s.

But then, when David Williamson sat down to write his latest play, he originally thought it would be about competition between males.

He got distracted when he started thinking about the partners of his two male characters and about a friend of his wife, who had had a terrible time trying to have a baby. "I talked to her at length, and I suddenly thought, 'Well, that's a whole lot more intense and interesting than the story I was about to try and tell."'

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He became intrigued by the way that this friend - an independent filmmaker and strong feminist - had always thought she didn't want to have children but had become consumed by the desire when she hit 39.

"For no reasons that she can trace, or put down to any particular thing, suddenly she got a very strong desire to have a child. And then she went through what she called IVF hell."

Australia's best-known playwright read up on this hell, and on surrogacy, and came across inspiring accounts of women bearing children for their infertile sisters.

"I started to think in terms of drama, if we had one of those altruistic acts by a younger sister for an older sister, and then later in life the younger sister decided she did want a baby, and then found she'd left it too late - what kind of resonances and difficulties and complications might ensue for the two sisters and for their joint daughter?"

This, in a nutshell, is the plot of Williamson's new play, Birthrights, which begins previewing at the Playhouse tonight.

The play opened in Melbourne in April, and will be directed here by the Ensemble Theatre's Sandra Bates. It will be the second in a row of Williamson's plays to open with the Ensemble.

Kate Raison plays the older sister, Helen, who is devastated when she finds out she can't have children. Andrew Doyle plays her ranting, right-wing husband, and Michelle Doake plays Helen's younger sister, the career-driven Claudia, who agrees to have a baby for her. Claudia's self-absorbed, left-wing partner, Martin (Glenn Hazeldine), is dismayed and, initially, so is her mother (Lorraine Bayly).

Like most of Williamson's plays, this one tackles its issues head on, debating all sides, and throwing in references to contemporary flashpoints such as refugees and other government policies.

Bates - who has previously directed eight of Williamson's plays - says it is unusual in that it has four substantial parts for women and only two for men. "But you see, Williamson has this skill now to really write excellent roles for women, and that's relatively new.

"He wrote The Perfectionist years ago, and that was the first time I think that you saw a play that really understood women's roles. I think he was responding to criticism that he writes these wonderful plays for men, but the women are always kind of handbags."

It has been an emotionally exhausting play to do, says Bates. In recent years, there has been an explosion of debate about fertility, particularly with books such as Sylvia Ann Hewlett's Baby Hunger: The New Battle for Motherhood. There have been tears during rehearsals.

"All the cast members have friends who are under these pressures [to have children], or are feeling it themselves. It is everyday. You open the paper and there's something by somebody talking about these issues."

The play also raises questions about whether or not - and when - to tell children they were the product of IVF or surrogacy. These decisions become murky in instances where women donate eggs or men donate sperm. "In a lot of these cases, they don't tell the children," says Williamson. "So there are some children out there growing up not realising that their aunt is their mother, and it's happening with increasing frequency."

The issue is particularly fraught now that genetic research suggests it is not just physical characteristics that we inherit from our parents, but also aspects of our personality. It is unsurprising that when children are told that the people bringing them up are not their biological parents, they often want to find out who their birth parents are. "There seems to be an insatiable curiosity about biological parents."

Williamson stresses that the play doesn't argue that surrogacy is wrong; just that it is difficult.

"It's not clear-cut and easy. You can't just donate your egg, donate your sperm, and go away and forget about the whole business. There might be complications further down the track."